Societal and Situational Deviance (www.sociology.org.uk)

When thinking about the nature of rule-making in any society, it is evident that we need to think about two main levels of analysis, namely the cultural and the subcultural. This distinction is important because it's clear that while a society as a whole may proscribe some form of behaviour (by making it illegal, for example), this is not necessarily true for a subcultural group.

On the contrary, for some subcultural groups the very fact that their behaviour is considered deviant by "society" (the cultural level of analysis) may be a significant factor in a subcultural group's formation and internal cohesion.

Sociologically, we can express this idea in terms of what Plummer has argued is the difference between societal (that is, society wide or cultural) and situational (that is, local or subcultural)  deviance. This distinction is particularly helpful because it reinforces the idea that behaviour considered deviant in one situation may be considered non- deviant in another.

By "societal deviance" Plummer means the various categories of behaviour that are either illegal or which are "commonly sensed" by people to be deviant (such as swearing at your teacher).

"Situational deviance", on the other hand, refers to the way different subcultural (or situational) groups develop norms of behaviour that may be at odds with those of "society as a whole". In such situations, behaviour that might be considered deviant in a particular culture (theft, homosexuality and so forth) may be perfectly acceptable in a subcultural setting.

To illustrate the above, consider the example of a couple removing their clothes:

• If they insist on doing this in the middle of a busy street they are "societally deviant" since, in terms of the basic norms governing public behaviour in our society, this is a deviant act.
• If they do the same thing in the privacy of their own home, however, this behaviour is not, situationally, deviant since no norms of behaviour have been broken.

This distinction serves to highlight both the complexity of "deviance" ( when we consider it in terms of the behaviour of real people) and the fact that how behaviour is interpreted by different groups (in effect, what the same behaviour means to different people) is a significant factor in relation to their behaviour. In this respect, Howard Becker captures the cultural and subcultural complexity of "deviance" when he argues:
"Deviance is not a quality of what people do (the act). Rather it is a quality of how people react to what you do"